Psychical Spacings
This chapter explores the complex relationship between spatiality and the psyche in psychoanalysis and in deconstruction. For Derrida, Freud’s spatialized models of the mind are a key element in psychoanalysis’s break with the traditional ‘Platonism’ of metaphysics, explored here through the examples of Plato and Edmund Husserl. In attending to the importance of space in Derrida’s work, this chapter provides a detailed account of his well-known neologism ‘différance’. Although différance has sometimes been interpreted as a theory of time, Derrida’s engagement with the phenomenological and psychoanalytic traditions highlights différance’s status as a movement of spacing (espacement), as the structural ‘co-implication’ of time and space. This co-implication is examined here through a reading of Derrida’s early essay, ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’ (‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’), a text which surveys the problematic relationship between anatomical (or neurological) space and the virtual space of Freud’s metapsychology. Situating Derrida as a thinker of spatial difference and its aporias provides an important means of engaging his work with the recent ‘materialist’ turn in the humanities, represented here in Catherine Malabou’s neuroscientific challenge to deconstruction.